


Ripple

by speccygeekgrrl



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-07
Updated: 2009-10-07
Packaged: 2017-10-02 12:41:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speccygeekgrrl/pseuds/speccygeekgrrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Arthur had been telling the truth, and Angela <i>had</i> tried to drown the baby Gabriel? What would drive a mother to do such a thing?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ripple

She started having the nightmares around her seventh month of pregnancy. Even now, she still wishes she'd had them earlier, because an abortion would have saved so much pain in the long run. But no, only in her third trimester, when she was too heavy and exhausted from the child inside her to do much more than dream.

Nathan would wake her up on the couch when she drifted off, his ten-year-old face too solemn for a small boy, and ask if she'd had a nightmare, and if people could have nightmares if it wasn't night, and why weren't there daymares? And wasn't a mare a horse like the one he took lessons on? Patiently, Angela would answer his questions, mulling over her visions (because god, they felt like nightmares, but they were prophecies) and trying not to show the fear she felt.

For a week before she gave birth, the dreams stopped. She was grateful for the reprieve, exhaustedly grateful that the labor was quick and the delivery easy, compared to Nathan's birth. When the nurse cleaned her baby up and wrapped him in a blanket, when Angela held her second son for the first time, there was no fear or apprehension left. His dozy, dark brown eyes, the tiny perfect hands that waved, the wisps of dark baby hair over his soft skull, they all enchanted her.

Hopefully, she named him Gabriel, with a prayer that the archangel would look over him and change his fate.

She had a month of peace with her baby, a month in which her dreams focused elsewhere: Primatech concerns, a quickly-averted incident that would have left Nathan with a broken arm, a few as mundane as the next day's weather.

Gabriel was a quiet infant, more prone to fussing than all-out bawling and easily contented with a finger to hold or a nipple to suck. Angela liked to sing to him, swaying around the bedroom and spinning slowly as Gabriel's big eyes blinked up at her.

It was another afternoon when the dreams resumed. She was lying on her side, the baby cuddled back against her stomach, when she nodded off-- and her mind was instantly filled with horror, empty skulls and blood pooling on floors, screaming, Manhattan destroyed, and at the center of it all a tall slim man with Arthur's brows and her nose and Gabriel's beautiful dark eyes gone ugly with cruelty.

"No!" she cried as she woke up, startling the infant into a thin wailing. "Oh, no, shhh, my angel." Holding Gabriel to her breast, Angela was afraid that she was nursing the end of the world, or at least a strong harbinger of it.

She tried to ignore the dreams, but they kept coming, more frequently and more violently with each passing night. The one that finally broke her heart and her resolve to do right by her child was the one in which the grown-up Gabriel pinned her to the wall and begin to cut open her skull with nothing more than the wave of a finger.

Angela woke up in tears, not for the first time, and slipped out of bed without waking Arthur. Gabriel's bassinet was only a few steps away, and she cradled him carefully in her arms on the way to the bathroom down the hall.

At first, she refused to think about what she was doing; she told herself that she was simply drawing a bath for her baby, he was easier to bathe when he was sleepy, that was all. The water was warm around her hands while she washed him: fragrant baby shampoo, gentle soap, the softness of baby limbs and tummy.

"Stop staring at me," she whispered, looking away from Gabriel's dark steady gaze. "Oh, god, forgive me." Kneeling over the side of the tub, she pressed a soft kiss to his plump cheek. "I love you too much to let you become the devil, Gabriel."

Gently supporting him with both hands, Angela lowered her son into the bathwater, submerging him completely while tears rolled down her cheeks. The baby thrashed, fighting for air, struggling for life.

"Angela? What the hell are you doing?!" Arthur's voice was as bruising as his shoulder knocking her away. She cowered on the floor, watching her husband rescue Gabriel and doom the world.

 

Now Angela stands in the cold night, watching the familiar building of Primatech's Hartsdale facility burn, a monument to the failure of her generation's plans. Somewhere in that wreckage, a tall slender man with her husband's brows and her nose and such desperation to be special that he would destroy the world for recognition lies with a shard of glass in his head, catching fire in the pyre of the trap he laid out himself.

Somewhere in that fire, Angela's second son lies in flames, and for all the evil he committed, for all that he did that could have been prevented in water, Angela cries for Gabriel.


End file.
